The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
Photograph of the first Solvay Conference in 1911 at the Hotel Metropole. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes is standing third from the right.
Benjamin Couprie/Wikimedia Commons
Superconductivity may sound like science fiction, but the first experiments to achieve it were conducted over a century ago. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, credited with the discovery, won a Nobel Prize in 1913.
Basic research often involves lab work that won’t be appreciated until decades down the line.
Sebastian Condrea/Moment via Getty Images
The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine made a discovery that helped create the COVID-19 vaccines. They couldn’t have anticipated the tremendous impact of their findings.
The Nobel Prize categories were set up more than a century ago. Since then, science has grown and evolved in unpredictable ways.
In this 1979 photo, Mother Teresa receives the Nobel Peace Prize during a ceremony at Oslo University. At right is the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, John Sanness. In subsequent years, Mother Teresa has faced criticisms.
(Henrik Laurivik/NTB via AP, File)
Peace can become political when advocates oppose or try to reform governments and societies pursuing hostile foreign relations — or when these societies perpetuate injustice and oppression at home.
Riverside communities in the Pantanal make sustainable use of natural resources within an unpredictable system.
The research and vision of Canadian scientists were key foundations of the Human Genome Project. Today, lack of funding threatens discovery research in Canada.
(Pixabay)
On DNA Day, Canada should be inspired by the lifesaving discoveries of its researchers. However, lack of funding threatens Canadian researchers’ ability to meet the challenges of the future.
Cryo-electron tomography shows what molecules look like in high-resolution – in this case, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Nanographics
Many microscopy techniques have won Nobel Prizes over the years. Advancements like cryo-ET that allow scientists to see the individual atoms of cells can reveal their biological functions.
Dario Fo at the Venice Film Festival, 1985.
Gorupdebesanez/Wikimedia Commons
John Banville calls Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill’s Hotel, ‘an inexplicably neglected 20th-century masterpiece’. Carol Lefevre shares her fascination with William Trevor’s ‘crazed’ photographer Ivy Eckdorf.
Left to right: Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig.
The Nobel Foundation
Until Diamond and Dybvig published key papers in the early 1980s, it wasn’t well understood that perfectly healthy banks could be brought down by panicking depositors.
Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her autofiction masterpiece, The Years, has been called a modern In Search of Lost Time.
The French writer has won the Nobel for literature for her ascetic approach to writing and fearlessness in covering the personal and taboo.
Imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski is one of three Nobel peace prize winners. Here, receiving a prize for his work in 2020.
TT News Agency/Alamy
Imprisoned Belarus activist Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine have shared the award.
Devices like this experimental apparatus can produce pairs of photons that are linked, or ‘entangled’.
Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Click and bioorthogonal chemistry has enabled researchers to closely study how molecules work in their natural state in living organisms, with applications that span from cancer treatment to polymers.
When two particles are entangled, the state of one is tied to the state of the other.
Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
A multitude of experiments have shown the mysterious phenomena of quantum mechanics to be how the universe functions. The scientists behind these experiments won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics.